Evolution

Evolution answers two questions about any artifact: where did this come from, and what would I break if I changed it.

Lineage and blast radius

        WHERE IT CAME FROM                      WHAT IT INFLUENCES
        (dependencies)                          (dependents)

        Provider ──┐                         ┌── Evaluation A
        Dataset  ──┼──►  THIS ARTIFACT  ──────┼── Evaluation B
        Prompt   ──┘                         └── Benchmark C
                                                      │
                                              transitive impact:
                                              everything downstream
                                              of those

Before you change something, you should know what it will affect. Evolution makes that explicit rather than leaving it to memory — and memory is exactly what fails when a dataset is regenerated three months after anyone touched it.

What the tab holds

Verdict banner — impact before inventory. The first thing you see is what a change here would mean, not a list of rows.

Where it came from — the artifact's dependencies.

What it influences — its dependents, and the transitive impact count.

Deployment timeline (AI Git) — every revision, which is promoted, rollback readiness, and the recorded rationale for each change. See AI Git.

How it changed — the historical revisions.

Evidence — the evaluations that bear on this artifact.

Where the relationships come from

They are real, not declared. The graph is built from actual references: an evaluation that pins a prompt genuinely depends on it; an agent configured with a provider genuinely reaches it. Nobody maintains a dependency file, so nothing can be out of date.

Impact as a number that means something

The impact count appears throughout the platform — in Brok answers, in investigations, in Evolution itself — and it is always accompanied by a sentence saying what it means:

"Promoting it changes what 3 downstream artifacts depend on." "Nothing downstream depends on this artifact, so the promotion is contained."

A bare number invites misreading. A number with its consequence stated is engineering information.

Questions Evolution answers

• Can I safely regenerate this dataset? — check the dependents.
• Why does this evaluation exist? — check its dependencies.
• Is this prompt still used anywhere? — an artifact with no dependents may be dead weight.
• What is the blast radius of this change? — the transitive impact.
• Is production running the newest revision? — the deployment timeline.

Brok reaches the same reading with "Show every artifact affected by X" and "What changed between these revisions?".

See also: AI Git · Forge Graph · Registry